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Graphics Graphics Card Market Drops 20% - less than 30M

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Guest-16, 10 Mar 2016.

  1. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    Not wholly surprising given it was yet another 28nm year, and cards that can power 4K not cheap enough yet. This year should jump up again in the 2H with the new 14/16nm products and VR pushing upgrades. Can't think of a 'Crysis' game in a while that pushed people to upgrade though.

    The dropping TAM (total addressable market) is particularly bad for AMD though - who need as big market as possible AND to increase their share in order to regain solvency. A smaller TAM means they have to grab even more than ~33% for break-even.
     
  2. GeorgeK

    GeorgeK Swinging the banhammer Super Moderator

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    That's the thing - graphics haven't progressed all that much in the last couple of years and even newer games (Fallout 4, Rise of TR) aren't too much for my 2 x GTX780s which are a good couple of years old now (2 years since I bought them and 3 (?) years since they were released).
     
  3. Vault-Tec

    Vault-Tec Green Plastic Watering Can

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    The only sector that desperately needs more power is 4k. I can finally achieve the magical 60 FPS my monitor allows by running two Fury X in CFX but I'm still at the mercy of game developers and AMD.

    Once we get the next Titan/high end Polaris that should hopefully be sorted (if they show the gains that Titan X had over Titan Black for example) and then everyone should be about sorted.

    DX12 doesn't seem to be revolutionary, more that it fixes a lot of hardware arguments that DX11 didn't.

    I'll be buying one of these new gen cards. You watch though, sod's law 100hz or something 4k will become a thing and I'll be back to chasing the sodding dragon lol.
     
  4. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    Greatly enhanced CPU threading and on-metal coding is the big thing I can see, but Vulcan can do that now too. I've seen a screenie The Division scales over almost perfectly 8 cores; whether that's pure code effort or DX12 support I'm not sure, yet, though.

    Until DP1.3 arrives (maybe on 2016 cards), you won't get any upgrades on the display front for bigger/faster resolutions as we've run out of bandwidth. 3440p and 4K will be dropping in price and 144/165 will be more common at WQHD and Freesync will continue to grow. No idea if GSync will price-drop.
     
  5. LennyRhys

    LennyRhys Fan Fan

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    I'd say it's been more than two years since graphics have really progressed. Crysis still looks amazing by today's standards, and let's not forget it'll be celebrating its 9th birthday at the end of this year. Hell, even Half Life 2: Lost Coast still looks good, and it goes back more than a decade. :lol:

    Of course there have been major advances with things like dynamic lighting, soft shadows, materials, and (most notably) physics, but I really don't get the feeling that graphics have significantly evolved for a number of years, even with the likes of Metro and the burgeoning Crysis franchise. Crysis 3 might look amazing but it's still using alpha maps for foliage!

    Perhaps part of the problem is that hardware has caught up with software, which wasn't the case back in 2007/08 when Crysis chewed up and subsequently spat out everything we could throw at it, even 8800 Ultras in SLI.

    I've just upgraded to a 780Ti and I'm completely blown away by the power of this card... steady 45-50fps in Crysis 3 @ 2560x1600. And to think that this hardware is almost two-and-a-half years old.
     
  6. Vault-Tec

    Vault-Tec Green Plastic Watering Can

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    I ran Crysis at 4k recently. It needed some hacking but it looked fantastic. Not out of place in any way.
     
  7. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    We don't need a new Crysis - VR will kick off the need for high end GPUs in 2016/2017.
     
  8. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Not in any great volume, I wouldn't have thought. There aren't that many people who can splurge the sharp end of a grand on a VR kit and top-end GPU. It'll take a dramatic price drop for VR to start making a real impact in overall revenue for GPU makers, I'd wager.
     
  9. GuilleAcoustic

    GuilleAcoustic Ook ? Ook !

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    If VR doesn't die before the 2nd gen... This is even more a niche market than high end GPU.
     
  10. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

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    I agree that games that demand high end cards are a little thin on the ground, but do not advocate another system-breaker that most people can't play maxed out, five years after it's release.

    Perhaps the decline is also because a lot of people think £500-600 is a hideous amount to pay for a flagship card.

    Yep - VR needs to be accessible for the masses before it will have a profound impact.
     
  11. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    VR/AR 2nd/3rd gen in 2017-18 - when the price drops by half - will be more mass market. Once people see more proof of concepts and the affordable graphics cards start rolling out.
    It's got too much momentum behind it now to fail; and unlike 3DTVs people see it and want it.

    10nm should only be 18-24 months behind this year's 2nd-gen 14/16, unlike 28 which was 3 years because the 20-node was a failure on all parts. GloFo now apparently have a effective 22nm FDX but it's too late. 10 might/will be a 36 month wait though. Depends. Cost of every FAB gen now is much higher and GPUs aren't getting any smaller - 28nm and possibly 22FDX was the sweet spot.
     
  12. Chris_Waddle

    Chris_Waddle Loving my new digital pinball machine

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    The biggest thing stopping me from needing to upgrade my graphics cards is as mentioned above, the lack of uptake on DP1.3

    I refuse to 'game' as low as 60fps and so to run higher (with G-sync) the max I can go is 2560x1440. I can do this easily on the cards I have, so until things change I won't be upgrading.

    VR is of no interest to me at all though. I love the concept and hope it does take off, it just makes me feel sick as did 3D (thank god that died a death).
     
  13. Vault-Tec

    Vault-Tec Green Plastic Watering Can

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    It will take some one like Sony to make VR a real thing IMO. Having to have a £1000 anchor before you spend £600 on a headset which is likely to be completely irrelevant within two years won't work.

    Thankfully I'm really not very interested in VR at all.

    I agree that graphics are not progressing too (and we all know why, see also; The Division being dumbed down because of them).

    How to fix that is an issue, because making games has become all about making money.

    Also this. Had I not been a pleb and spent £600 on a 4k monitor and been more sensible and gone 1440p I would most certainly been using my Titan Blacks still and would not have furnished AMD with two sales 'this' gen.
     
  14. andreinuk

    andreinuk Minimodder

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    Perhaps the increase in performance of the IGP of Intel and Amd over the last few years has been cutting in to the market?

    Whilst the high end is normally what we go for surely the sales figures are made up of a lot of the lower end cards.

    With the ability of these integrated solutions and the ever decreasing size of desktops perhaps this
    is contributing quite a bit.

    Would be interesting to see how the figures breakdown to the ranges (low, mid and high).
     
  15. Impatience

    Impatience Minimodder

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    If Star Citizen & VR keeps up its current draw on powerful equipment, then we MAY have a new Crysis scenario.. I know I'll be upgrading my rig to play it at decent frame rates when it's released in full!
     
  16. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    That is why I said 2017.

    Also - the TAM for GPUs is going to have a huge amount of crossover with people picking up a headset.
     
  17. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    You need v.low persistence pixels, fast refresh displays (v.expensive) with head tracking. Once you've got something that feels natural you'll lose the sick. That's where HTC wins on the head tracking part.
    I want one of these though: virtuix.com

    This is exactly how I feel. I should have waited and gone 1440p or WQHD instead of 40k/60. Bah.
     
  18. stephen0205

    stephen0205 MrSteve

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    Ill be adding to the yearly intakes for gpus.

    I have the amd 290 which is a nice card. But its only ok for 60pfs gaming at 1080-1440 with everything on high.

    Damb year impossible on crappy ports tho. Ac syndicate was rediculious, High settings it still dips less than 60 at 1080.

    It dont think its that we need super cards to play the games. Its that u need to fair enough for some resolutions. I get that.

    But some games are just so badly optimised that u need to throw more cards at them. And if that happens to be ... YOUR GAME ...then your probably willing to do that.

    For me its gears. But they wrecked it bringing it to pc. ..both times funnily enough.

    But for me il be goin 1440p not 4k. The price is just too much. For the lower performance. No thanks.

    1440p ill be quite content.
     
  19. Vault-Tec

    Vault-Tec Green Plastic Watering Can

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    Seriously speaking you've made the right decision. 4k requires far too much power for gains that are sometimes not even noticeable. It's absolutely ridiculous how much GPU power 4k needs.

    The main problem with 4k is that the consoles can not run 4k with anything even remotely near an acceptable frame count, so for the most part there are no real 4k textures just upscaled smaller ones. And in most games this shows, whilst still needing ridiculous amounts of horse power just to get them moving.

    Don't get me wrong sometimes it's an absolute revelation (Rise of the Tomb Raider) but others it's just like a wet fart.
     
  20. megadelayed

    megadelayed What's a Dremel?

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    To be perfectly fair, I think that the decline in graphics cards sold is probably due to the amount of people that makes up the PC Gaming community now. The majority of the old players have now grown up and plays video games a lot less often, making upgrades to the increasingly expensive high end GPUs harder and harder to justify.

    Whereas the 'new' generation plays mostly MOBA's like LoL etc which aren't very graphically demanding and is perfectly playable on the improving integrated graphics which allows reasonable FPS even on medium settings , unlike a few years ago when integrated graphics were so bad that it pushed people onto discrete cards, but these people don't know enough so they just go for the cheapest ones, hence why cards like the G210 and G520, usually with like 4GB vRAM is usually the top sellers on sites like Amazon, as well as shipped with supermarket PC's labeled with 'DEDICATED GRAPHICS - VERY GOOD FOR GAMING':nono:, and these are the cards that made up a sizeable portion of the volume sold.

    Furthermore, most people have started to go for gaming laptops now, since they look a lot more 'fancy', don't cost a fortune like they did a few years ago, and performance in the laptops is more or less very acceptable for most and thin enough to be portable. Compare this to the 'gaming laptops' a few years ago which looked like a concrete slab, sounded like a jet taking off when you load up Microsoft Word then proceeded to turn itself off as the 30 minute battery life was up, you can see why people have moved on to laptops.
     

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